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Emily Alford

Travesty

By Emily Alford

It was the spring of 1961, as I recall. I was a junior at my Christian Brothers school in upstate New York. For ten years, I'd been secretly cross-dressing, and the psychological burden was intolerable. At the time, and in my culture, there was no question of seeking psychological help. So, like a good Catholic boy, I turned to the confessional. After all, it was "wrong" so it had to be a sin. And we all knew that we could tell the priest anything in the confessional, because he'd heard it all before. How to reconcile that with my own terrible sense that I was all alone? How to deal with my gnawing awareness that I really wanted to be a girl?

I tried priest after priest. I knew the word "transvestite" by then, and I remember going to one several times, identifying myself that way. "I wish you'd never heard that word," he finally said. So much for that confessional box.

Finally, somebody listened, and started to ask questions. I was naive, utterly, and when he began to probe me on one or another sexual experience I found myself confronted with possibilities that I never had imagined. He told me--rightly--that I needed help that went beyond the confessional, and invited me to meet him in the priest's house. Perhaps he would have helped. But looking now at some of the horrors that Catholic clergy have visited upon troubled boys, I wonder. I'll never know. I didn't dare keep the appointment.

Only a few weeks later, my Latin teacher walked into class and wrote "travesty" on the blackboard. "Oh no," I thought, because I knew what was coming. He explained the etymology of the word, from trans, meaning across, and vestis, meaning clothing, and then launched in. Some boys, it seemed, wanted to wear girls' clothes. "If you want to do this, you have a very serious problem indeed. Something is really wrong."

I think I had mentioned my school to the priest who had asked all those questions. The secrecy of the confessional was assured, but had he called the Brothers' house at the school and told them what he had heard from one of their students? Had Brother Cormac (real name) picked me out as the likely culprit? I cannot know and will never know. I do know that I blush easily and that while he talked I must have gone utterly red. I do know that I shrank as well as I could into my desk.

That was the end of it, and I thank whoever needs thanking, God, Goddess, Fate, or common sense. Thirty years later I've read about the horrors that the time visited upon transgendered youth. I never did end up inside some institution, being given insulin or electroshocks. I never found myself facing somebody determined to make me what I could never have been. It did happen to others like me, and when I read about it now I boil with outrage, because it could have happened to me.

I knew I needed help, and I tried hard to find it. But it wasn't there to find. Maybe times have changed.



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